You would probably make more money if you were any good at gray/black hat stuff. Further, if you were less blatantly evil than this individual, you'd probably be able to finagle a slap on the wrist followed by a stable career in civilian street if/when you got busted.
One of the things that you learn as you grow older is that you can't be successful and have a conscience at the same time in this world. Software developers are fortunate enough to be able to scrape out a comfortable existence without stooping too far, but don't kid yourself: the large TechCos that sign our paychecks and buy our startups are not paragons of virtue.
Slight problem though: a slap on the wrist is still a criminal record, and if you're unlucky your 'slap on the wrist' may end up being a much harsher sentence and if you piss off the wrong person other kinds of retribution.
Large TechCos can - for now - not be jailed but you can and you will, see TFA.
Less blatantly evil doesn't mean you're going to walk away free, besides, you'll be a blackmail target for life.
Oh, and it is quite possible to both be successful and to have a working conscience.
I dunno about the UK, but I think RFID readers might just be cheaper because they require so little maintenance.
I bought a single-use one-way subway ticket recently. When I got to the turnstiles, none of them had slots to swipe or insert the ticket.
Of course, it's 2023. You can tap the paper ticket as if you had a refillable or monthly pass, it has the RFID circuitry sandwiched between paper layers. No more mechanical moving parts which can break and slow down the rush hour commute.
You can only keep a genie bottled up for so long, and if you don't rub the lamp, your adversaries will.
With something as potentially destabilizing as AGI, realpolitik will convince individual nations to put aside concerns like IP and copyright out of FOMO.
The same thing happened with nuclear bombs: it's much easier to be South Africa choosing to dispose of them if you end up not needing them, than to be North Korea or Iran trying to join the join the club late.
The real problem is that the gains from any successes will be hoarded by the people who acquired them by breaking the law.
My grandparents and parents used to spout idioms like, "hard work is its own reward" as if they were inalienable truths.
IMO it's baked in at a cultural level, at this point. Where did it come from? You could point to the harsh Puritan work ethic, or the myth of meritocracy, or the rivers of blood lurking in the US' past, but there's probably no single root cause.
> My grandparents and parents used to spout idioms like, "hard work is its own reward" as if they were inalienable truths.
Are you grandparents representatives of capitalism?
I am sure if you go to the most socialist or communist country out there, you will find grandparents saying the same thing. Source: me, I come from one such country.
The pie was smaller back in the day, but it was sliced more evenly.
If real income had kept up with productivity gains, we might still live in a world where ordinary people could afford to invent and patent expensive new forms of recreation.
It still happens, but only the extremely wealthy can participate in their devopment. Water-jet hoverboards, VR, green homesteading...
I personally have prototyped an idea for a small, cheap, flexible consumer product that I would love to build and sell, but I don't have 7 figures to burn if it doesn't work out - I can't even afford a house on a low 6-figure salary, nevermind saving enough to start a business! So it will remain a pipe dream until some large organization with loads of capital picks the low-hanging fruit.
From what I've seen, that's a good way to give the drop-ship economy-of-scale undercutters a head start.
Honestly, I think something like as-seen-on-TV would work better for a novel widget idea. You could sell an initial run all at once, and fund future development if it turned out to be popular: I guess the modern equivalent would be Instagram or YouTube ads. But I don't have enough capital to build up enough stock for a launch, when the runway for clones is about 4 months from the point where a mainland factory catches wind of your idea.
The incentive to actually implement and sell an idea once you see that it can be done cheaply and easily doesn't exist in our current economy, unless you already have so much capital that you don't need to work. It's a frustrating catch-22.
One of the things that you learn as you grow older is that you can't be successful and have a conscience at the same time in this world. Software developers are fortunate enough to be able to scrape out a comfortable existence without stooping too far, but don't kid yourself: the large TechCos that sign our paychecks and buy our startups are not paragons of virtue.